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Domain, hosting and email, explained
Three things you pay for separately that people mix up all the time. What each one is, where it comes from, and why all three belong in your name.
Published One Other
What is a domain?
It is the address. oneother.io, say, or yourname.com.
You buy it from a registrar such as Namecheap, OVH or Gandi, and you pay for it every year. It comes with no website and no email. It is just the name.
What is hosting?
It is the computer your site lives on, connected to the internet all day. When someone types your address, that is where the pages come from.
Some hosting comes with a site builder, like Squarespace or Wix. Some only stores a site that someone built, like Vercel, where this one lives.
And email on your own domain?
It lets you send mail from an address on your own domain rather than a Gmail one. It is paid for separately, usually per person, through Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or another email service.
It looks like a detail. To whoever receives the message, it says the business has an address of its own.
Why should all of it be in your name?
Because whoever holds the account holds the control. If the domain sits in the name of whoever built your site and that relationship ends, getting your own address back can take weeks.
Ask for the logins to everything and keep them in a password manager. People who work with you get access, and the account stays yours.
What happens if you forget to renew the domain?
The site and the email stop working. After the recovery period the domain can go back on sale, and some people buy expired domains to resell them.
Turn on automatic renewal and check that the card on file is still valid. If you are not sure what you have or whose name it is in, write to us and we will sort it out with you.
Start with an email.
The six questions come next.
What you send us stays between us, and it leaves here as your files.